My Love Affair with SW:TOR Is Over

Prologue: I wrote this post last week. After this was posted, I received confirmation from twitter courtesy of Asros that the log would be self only, and a preview of the log coming in 1.2 courtesy of Kadomi. I highly recommend checking out both those links & thank them for their help! My opinion remains unchanged though: a game with a crippled self-only combat log will not support the difficult, engaging encounters & the raiding community I love in WoW. My sub remains canceled. Thanks for reading & feel free to disagree below. Original text follows.

I have been pretty exuberant about my love of SW:TOR on twitter for the last few months. I certainly don’t regret buying the game, and I firmly believe that, looking back at my library of games played, it will remain one of the most memorable experiences I’ve ever had. But like so many, my excitement quickly soured once I reached endgame. This is unfortunate, because I find myself with a rather large amount of free time now that Something Wicked is one night clearing. Spare time I rather hoped SW:TOR would fulfill.

Unfortunately, I find myself, like so many other peers of mine, cancelling my subscription. SW:TOR, we can’t see each other anymore, and it’s not me. It’s you.

Raiding without a combat log sucks.

There are so many things that have frustrated me about endgame in SW:TOR. I’m not going to list off them all because Patch 1.2 (the “Jesus Patch”) promises to fix almost all of them. But guess what patch 1.2 doesn’t have? A combat log. And that’s my #1 biggest complaint.

It’s so massively frustrating to spend a couple of hours with the nice Sage/Sorc simcraft tool to play with my mods & then log onto the game…. and realize that I can’t really see the effect of any of it. It sucks to forget some cooldowns, feel guilty, then realize that the only person who gets impacted is like, me, and my personal honor. It sucks to play with cooldowns and popping them at different times and to have no feedback at all about their relative impact. It sucks to realize that the people who built the (very impressive) Simcraft tool are still struggling to understand the impact of a stat like Alacrity on dot ticks and the GCD because we don’t have access to basic, basic performance information. It sucks to die to an ability and to realize you’ve no idea how hard it hit or what it was called.

I had no idea how much of my fun raiding was caught up in this stream of information that I completely took for granted… until I had to play without one. It sucks.

I have no problem with players min-maxing. I’m min-maxing myself. We do have pretty good… the tooltips are pretty good. The information on the items I think is pretty good. We’re right now lacking a bit is in the evaluating your performance or your group’s performance. Umm what I can tell you is there’s no conspiracy where we’re like we’re hiding this so people aren’t discriminating against other players. If you want to, you know, run a very competitive operations group and you wanna improve, having this data is certainly interesting. Umm and we’re not against it, it’s just right now not in.

High priority, eh? Well, it’s been three months and all we have is “Don’t worry guys, we plan to put a combat log in. Someday. Not in Patch 1.2.” I like their definition of high priority.

Oh, and speaking of patch 1.2 and the combat log that’s not in it, I’m also really confused about what kind of a log they plan to add. Self only? Everyone seems to think so based on what the devs said at the Guild Summit, but I have been unable to find a definitive quote. Here’s the best transcript I could find (cough… that Zothen could find) of the Operations & Flashpoints panel:

Q: Threat meters, dps meters – are they coming? what is bioware’s stance? A: we want reliance on in-game visual cues but that is not we say we won’t give you dps and threat meters. We will have them in but just not in 1.2. We you to have control over what other see about your character – we went for the middle ground – in 1.2 you will be able to use a simple input in the chat system to see what defeated you. we also have a very detailed combat log you can write to your disk – someone enterprising can use it for their guild to see their performance but it will be out of game (3rd party).

Alright. There are some good plans here. Out of game? That’s fine. Written to hard drive? That’s fine. All I want is a WOL Live Log type thing. I don’t care about in game.

My guildmates always get mad at me for my twitter screenshots because about 90% of the time I post a kill shot, I have my recount on Deaths instead of something epeeny like DPS. Well, guess what. That’s often what I’m looking at on a progression kill. I wrote a post a while ago about my first raid with SW– one of the very first lessons I learned like, one hour into raid, was to figure out what killed me every time I died. It’s a habit now, if I die, I look at what killed me and how hard it hit me. So my recount is set on deaths quite often.

Not just my deaths either. I want to know what killed the whole raid. Newsflash: when there are 25 people in the raid and you are working on a boss as a team, it’s pretty useful also to know what mistakes the other 24 people make so that you can make sure to avoid them yourself.

Raiding is a team sport. We are working together. The performance information that has to do with what I am doing is 1/25 of the picture and frankly, it’s of limited utility to me. I want to learn from the mistakes my cohorts make, and when I make a mistake, I want that information to be shared with them so they can avoid it. If someone else dies from something, I want to know how hard it hit them.

SWTOR doesn’t get it. Our first couple SW:TOR nightmare mode raids were just awful. “I wonder what killed me?” or “___ killed me but I wish I knew what the ability was or how much it hit for.” And it’s nice to know what killed you, but are you soloing that boss or are you in there with a team? Don’t you want to learn from what everyone has been doing? Isn’t that the whole point of teamwork?

DPS checks are a group effort, not a solo endeavor.

When we as a group fail to make a DPS check, I want to look at what everyone’s doing — not always to judge but also to wonder which classes are optimal for what. I know my class and love my class. Rets are very, very good at certain kinds of DPS (burst, certain kinds of extended single target, long term cleave with many targets) and really fucking terrible at other kinds (2-4ish targets, target switching, short term cleave). There are about 100 other things that affect whether a ret will be a good or bad class to use, but you know what? It’s important for me to know my classes strengths and weaknesses so I have a general idea of where my strengths will be best used and what sorts of damage breakdowns to look at to see if I’m doing my job right. Guess where I learned this information? Research. World of Logs. My performance as a part of the whole raid’s performance. I didn’t just theoretically put it together from learning how my class works or simming myself on a target dummy. I familiarize myself with damage breakdowns and whenever I move through logs, I compare how I do to how other classes do in all different types of raiding situations.

I’m good at some things; I’m bad at other things. Sometimes I personally could stand to work on some tasks; sometimes my high or low relative damage is a reflection of my class’s strengths or weaknesses. Or what I had done in that fight wrong that someone else did right… or what I did right that other people did wrong. I have to see what my performance looks like in the larger, grander scheme of things. Simcrafting my DPS and hitting a target dummy, these are such a very small picture of what I actually do in a raid. I have to know what the whole, entire attempt looked like. I have to know how my DPS cog fits into the machine as a whole. There are so many fights where it has been critically important to break down damage by player, by class, by target to figure out how we as a group could shift what we were doing to better beat the fight. Or, conversely, break down a fight by damage taken — by how much damage we take from or soak from an attack– to alter positioning or healing or whatever we need to.

All of these metrics are group metrics. Self-only is just one very small part of the picture.

Just looking at what one individual person is doing… sure, it can help that particular person optimize their gear or their rotation, but it does not provide the data that we raiders need to really analyze, attack, and beat a truly difficulty encounter as a group. And if you don’t like playing with others, then… well… that’s the whole point of raiding!

SW:TOR bleeds out raiders

So I do understand that I fall into the category of WOW players that SW:TOR players hate. I probably live in Mom’s basement, raid 6 days a week, and feel good about myself by linking recount in party chat to noobs. (/rolleyes). Yeahhhh that’s definitely me and my little 12 hour guild, we aren’t real people, just trolls.

If this massive 2000 post plus discussion regarding the SWTOR combat log is to be believed, any raider that wants a combat log just wants it to troll others. The anti-combat-log forces don’t want one– they will fight for their fight to be free of judgement — and if we elitists really only want it to better ourselves, then we should be well and happy with a self-only log.

Sigh.

Do they really understand the part of the community that they so willfully denigrate? I’ll list off the sorts of people who would consider a combat log (like me) vital to our enjoyment of the game. How many people enjoy reading theorycrafting threads and seeing what people like my blog cohort Theck come up with? How many people — not just raiders, but people– happily benefit from and really enjoy reading about and discussing how precisely their classes work? How many people read those massive, massive EJ threads and enjoy them even if they don’t raid? I know back when I was a huge noob, before I even raided, before I even hit the level cap, I loved that kind of thing, I ate it all up. That kind of analysis is one of the reasons why I love wow– and I don’t do it; I read about it! How many people use addons like DBM for encounters complex enough to require it? How many people appreciate detailed strategy posts like the kind that Sunnier, or Icy Veins, or Tankspot write?

Do you want to guess how much information all of these people use out of a (raid wide) combat log to do all the things they do? A lot.

Those players who want to raid compelling and extremely difficult encounters, and to learn, and to share and enjoy…. these are the type of player that SW:TOR is losing in droves. One by one, I see raiders of all walks of life, from the casual to the hardcore, realizing that SW:TOR isn’t worth their $15/month anymore. Almost every current WoW raider I know has left SW:TOR. I was the last to go of at least five in my SW:TOR guild alone.

I would like to say yes. Sure, they messed up some tuning, and their encounters were buggy, but a lot of their ideas were stunning. I can see a raiding game in SW:TOR somewhere. I really did like a lot of the PVE content they’ve pumped out so far and it looks like they’re committed to learning from their mistakes and providing more. Many of their comments at the Ops panel, with regard to their UI improvements and Nightmare Mode tuning, are spot on for what I want to see out of the game.

But the combat log is the sticking point for me. It has to be there before I resub, a full hard-drive written raid-wide combat log. I honestly don’t believe you can design encounters as engaging, as fun, and as challenging as I want them to be while also denying that raid access to the information we want to analyze.

Unfortunately, I think they’ve already made their intentions (actions…. not words) clear with regard to their log plans.

And I mean, that might not be a bad thing. Maybe that’s the game SW:TOR wants to be. It’s a beautiful, lovely RPG with a great storyline – many great storylines – and perfect for all kinds of players. Maybe it really wants to have a more casual, more story and RPG focused endgame, even if that means losing the raiders such as myself.

That might be a great game. It’s just not the game for me.

Editor’s Note: When I emailed this to him, Theck told me to tie this post into WOW a little more. OOPS. Sorry. I’m the ret paladin on a prot blog; you should never expect me to be on topic at all!

Anyways, hopefully you all see the WOW relevant part.SW:TOR has taught me to appreciate some of the things that I take completely for granted in WoW…. like the combat log.

The vibrant, engaging community we have — which includes theorycrafters such as him as well as including Ranty QQ McRantersons such as myself — is something that I just cannot see SW:TOR supporting in their current plans for the game.

I might be done with WOW raid content until pandas crash land into my Azeroth, but this is still a better raider’s game than SW:TOR looks like it will ever be.

15 Responses to My Love Affair with SW:TOR Is Over

I can certainly see your points, and they are valid believe you me. But, I can’t help but to comment on a few things.

First, in some ways, I am very content, happy really, not to have to worry so much about Recount while I play. It’s been a joy to just run with friends, enjoy the content, and generally just focus on getting the job done.

I raid in WoW, in a semi-serious 10-man guild just now finishing up the latest content. We have several members that are rather serious data crunchers, and I am most certain that doing so is a part of the game that they enjoy, but it is not, nor has it ever been a favorite part of the game for me. We have members who focus very hard on being the best dps they can be, but we also have members that are just in it to socialize. The top dps in the group does not, nor have they ever been keen on denigrating the lower dps. At the end of the day, we all just do what we need to to get the boss down, which involves everyone doing their part. When the boss dies, then we know we got it right.

Having said this, I am also sure that a few members of my guild would throw great heaping gobs of wet spaghetti noodles at me for having said this, because I think that they think I’m one of them. The truth is, I do what I have to keep up, and that’s it. My heart hasn’t been in for a very long time now. I continue to raid thrice weekly just to hang with my friends, all of whom I met in the game, and all of whom I adore. (I can say stuff like that because I am secure in my manhood and have been married way too long to worry about sounding too sentimental…lol.) If I could convince them to join me in SWTOR I would, but only a handful have come over.

Secondly, the combat log thing is definitely something I miss, but not so much for raid/ops performance as simply to see what the hell just killed me! This is something that has to be put in the game, and it will be, in its first form in patch 1.2. The self-only limitation isn’t really a limitation at all. If it can be written to a file, then you and I both know that someone will figure out how to combine it into a tool with which to analyze ops wide performance.

Having it out of the game is a bonus in my opinion. It will cut down on the constant Recount dependency that I currently endure during our raid times, and open up the possibility of actually enjoying the content, be it a Flash Point or just PVP. It will also potentially cut down on the ‘your dps sucked on that last fight’ drama that can occur in some guilds in certain situations. Plus, a post ops analysis will give the number crunchers time to really absorb the information and think about possible solutions, then have those solutions ready to present to the guild. Only now it will be well thought out and ready for a measured presentation sans fail-rage.

I hope you will forgive me for responding at such length, but I found your post to be so well written and so well presented that it deserved a thorough response. I hope that you find what you’re looking for in WoW, or with us back in SWTOR, either way, I would love to do a run with you sometime in any game; it can be hard to find thoughtful players in any MMO. I wish you luck, and hope to count you among my compatriots, defending/destroying the Great Galactic Republic at some time in the near future.

Thanks for your comments! I have been thinking about how to respond. I really appreciate hearing from a different point of view

Actually you and I agree that out of game is fine (I wasn’t clear enough about this)… i’m totally ok with that, it might even be better out of game. But my problem with the log is that it is self only. It will have to be pieced together like a puzzle, way after the fact, and it’s not live at all.

Live feedback about what the whole raid is doing is something I consider just totally vital to raiding, and that is what is driving me from SWTOR– live part being critical. Even if I am having a bad night and my performance is off. You said a little about where you raid, I will mention where I raid. My peeps raid 12 hours only, no overtime, no nothing, and that includes FL every week. We are all about using every minute we have, we consider fun to be efficient. I wrote in a prev blog post about adjusting to the amount of discussion and analysis that we do between every pull– and the number of pulls that we can throw at a boss in an evening. The whole idea of lacking raid-wide combat feedback while raiding in those 4 hour evenings where I really really want to be productive … that is not fun raiding for me. It is the live part of the combat log that I consider so vital. But I realize this means I am rather more serious about the game than I should be; it is just what I consider fun.

Wiping for 4 hours and vaguely knowing nothing very little except assumptions about what’s going on…. that is the feeling that drove me away from SWTOR. “Well, we can check the logs after Officer X puts all 16 pieces together and uploads them later this week” will not bring me back. =/

You seem to be arguing that lacking a combat log would have everyone get along a little better. I guess that is true without Recount in 4 mans, but I’m thinking raids. I would respectfully submit that you and your wow friends get along raiding because you guys get along, not because or in spite of your slightly different raiding philosophies. The presence or absence of a combat log wouldn’t change that. Jerks who are stressed would just express it in other ways or bitch about getting access to someone’s info — or accuse them of lies.

Combat log is just a tool people can use to be jerks to one another or to play nice together. I bet precisely the same people would have drama with and without a raid-wide combat log, it will not lower drama at all.

But that is just my opinion. I definitely appreciate you posting yours too and thanks for the reply and for reading. I may come back to SWTOR one day…… purple lightsabers are rather pretty after all.

Quote me a mechanic and I will point to where WoW did it before and better. The best I can come up with, without thinking very hard about it, is jumping from platform to platform on Soa. One of the things that has amazed me about WoW ever since I started raiding it five years ago is their ability to continually pump out new and interesting encounters with fresh (or fresh feeling, via implementation) mechanics.

By comparison, the very first tier of SWTOR raiding seemed to be full of boring and easily managed mechanics (which failed to change significantly across difficulty levels). I’m not as forgiving as you have been in your analysis, so I obviously won’t be seeing the second tier.

I don’t like it when people pick apart my generalizations so I won’t list them all. 😛 I was trying to be nice to SWTOR. My point was that SWTOR was not trash. (Maybe you and I disagree, but I actually rather liked some of those SWTOR raids, buggy and all.) They were epic feeling. They were fun. The heath was off, the mechanics were off, but a lot of the ideas were fundamentally solid (again, in my opinion). I enjoyed raiding them even though they hadn’t thought all the numbers through. I liked puzzle boss 10x better than many of the DS bosses in WOW. Soa platforms were pretty cool. They had some epic design, and you can’t argue that they’re taking a smarter hand to the 8 vs 16 balance problem. I don’t know if you extensively did 8 and 16 Nightmare modes– I did experience them both, and they got closer to dual raid size balance than WOW has managed with its vaunted 7 years.

Sure, WOW did it all better, but I was giving SWTOR some credit here. I feel that if they wanted to promote engaging hardmode content, they could do it. They are choosing not to and that is what makes me so sad. It’s not that the game is trash.

It’s that it COULD be good and they don’t want it to be… because of a couple forum trolls.

P.S. – I read a thread today on the SWTOR forums arguing that argued that enrage timers should go away because they force people to play certain specs just because they are more competitive or where certain gear just because it has better stats. Ana, you would have loved it.

I can recall a number of similar threads on WoWs forums with people demanding any spec should be allowed in raids, and allowed to succeed, as it’s all “fun”. It should probably be noted though that it seems pretty clear threads like that are about as far from Biowares stance as possible, given how strict their enrage timers are, in fact in that aspect they’re mostly less forgiving than many of WoWs.

I’m sure its been said before, but comparing 7 years of WoW with 4 months of SW:ToR of course you’re going to be able to quote more examples and ideas from WoW, just the same as a company that’s been making cars for 7 years is going to have a lot more experience and previous history than a new startup.

WoW has gone through a huge number of different boss mechanics, if you’ve mastered all that there’s only so many different things they can do before you go “Oh yes, remember part A from Boss Y and Part B from Boss X, do both of those and it’s this boss!”. So of course someone who presumably has been raiding in WoW for years is going to find mechanics of fights relatively easy to grasp quickly whatever MMO they may be playing.

They certainly dropped the ball on the difficulty levels pre Nightmare, but if we are to believe them, serious changes to that are coming. Their apparent refusal to consider a full, proper combat log is utterly perplexing, if it has to be out of game then fine, whatever, but they must realise many people will want to play the game at a relatively serious level and for those people a full combat log is a must.

All in all though, it’s still a fresh, new game (and one that’s been launched remarkably well, I still cry when I remember the horror that was the first 6 months of WoW). If there are all these serious issues a year down the line, clearly, it’s not going to work, but right now I certainly find it a lot of fun. Nightmare modes are still challenging content and actually do a pretty good job of keeping me entertained personally, PvP is about as much fun as I’ve ever had doing so, between all SW:ToR gas to offer and a couple of nights of Dragon Soul Heroics I’m having far too much fun to complain about much right now, and that suits me just fine

You’re falling into the same fallacy that many many people fall into. The duration that the game has been released is no excuse for poor implementation. They aren’t competing with WoW from 7 years ago, so how their launch compares to WoW’s is completely irrelevant. It is in fact possible to release a well polished MMO that offers something beyond its predecessors: see RIFT. SWTOR just feels like a reskined WoW circa 20 man Zul’Gurub.

Rift?! We must have been playing different games. It was pretty, i’ll admit that much but for the game itself? All I saw was something 100% crafted around a rehashed Warhammer Online idea but without any real plot, ridiculously unbalanced specs that meant you ended up ignoring half your abilities (or more likely macroing 5 or 6 to one keypress) and endgame fights at 50 where the bosses literally stood there doing nothing waiting to die half the time, the other half they spammed abilities and wiped everyone in seconds… I suppose you could call that ‘something new’.

Whilst of course the programming ability, software, hardware, etc have all come on and with years of other MMOs to watch current releases have a significant advantage and a thus significant amount more to live up to, no-one who wants a sensible discussion can simply ignore the huge differences in knowledge when comparing a company with 7 years of experience in _running_ an MMO successfully to one with a few months. To expect perfection is foolish, to expect their best efforts, with mistakes fixed, is realistic.

The implementation and release of SW:ToR has been absolutely fantastic, that’s one thing that almost every review has agreed upon. Customer expectations have skyrocketed as the technology and quality of games has risen, and rightfully so, but it’s unfair to attempt to dismiss a game before they have even had a chance to actually learn and make changes (though this is exactly what I myself did with Rift, i’ll add, so I can certainly see your pov, I just disagree with it _this_ time 😉 ). Even with all the testing they do almost every game releases with a slew of bugs and errors (see Skyrim for example), but only MMOs are held to the standard that they must be perfect upon the day of release.

Luckily for me I’m happy to keep an open mind on this one and give them some time to make the game even better and to fix the places it is lacking and correct where they made poor choices, here’s to many more years of SW:ToR, Best MMO of 2012.

“It should probably be noted though that it seems pretty clear threads like that are about as far from Biowares stance as possible, given how strict their enrage timers are, in fact in that aspect they’re mostly less forgiving than many of WoWs.”

D: Have you done a lot of SWTOR raiding? I have found their enrage timers to be far, far, far too long. But that could be a difference of the level of content we were hitting. I found that a lot of the fights were just waaaaaaaay too long and had like 10 minute enrages, hahah. Opinion. You may have done some more nightmares than me. My SWTOR guild is working through their last 16 nightmare modes right now. I had more experience on the admittedly undertuned “hardmodes”.

But yes, some mechanics are indeed universal. That is why I didn’t really have an issue with the actual *design* of any of the SWTOR fights and in fact admired them. They got the numbers completely wrong, for boss health and ability damage and enrage timers, but that is a matter of design practice imo. If you took a lot of those SWTOR fights and made tweaks to the damage taken and dealt and required, you would end up with pretty compelling encounters; they just do not have tuning experience.

I did not fundamentally dislike the fights. I actually rather enjoyed what the devs had to say about their commitment to nightmare modes too. Like you said,” serious changes to that are coming.” It’s like they’re saying all the right things but then they have this weird dislike of putting a real combat log in the game?? I don’t get it. It’s ALMOST the game I want to play!

I wish you luck still having fun in the game, I think I will stick to wow pvp for a while. Maybe I will come back to SWTOR later

I think we seriously under geared a lot of the NMs when we did them, which probably made the fights seem a lot better with tightly tuned enrages than they were actually intended to be >.< Now we're doing the Nightmares in Rakata and Columi gear the enrage timers are definitely irrelevant, I guess hopefully the changes they've said they'll make going forwards will bring back that sense of urgency 😀

Who knows, they may even change enough to bring you back and make it enjoyable for you again, I would certainly love a proper combat log myself! We can but hope

(Truth in advertising: I haven’t done any raiding in SWTOR because I’m progression raiding in WoW. No one in my SWTOR wants to burn out trying to raid in two different games.)

The SWTOR team is more concerned with their community overall than just the raiding faction. That’s a different point of view from the Wow team’s placing raiding as the pinnacle of WoW endgame. When you view it that way, it is understandable why they are reluctant to have combat logs given that there are more people posting logs for epeen that the thoughtful folks who use then to improve themselves and their team.

Another part may simply be resources. Patch 1.2 is huge. We all have features we’d want to have in it, but with so much there something has to give in the priority list. Given that at most a 1/3 of the player base has even raided at all, it is understandable that they have picked other things that impact more people.

Another issue is, does the engine they bought support the type of combat log you want or do they have to code that in? This could be a case of something that sounds easy being difficult to get working properly because of engine constraints.

That said, if the game doesn’t have the feature you find fun definitely unsub and wait to see if they do add it in. The hopeful thing is that they are learning, improving, and are talking with their community. (The latter being something the WoW team was crappy at for most of WoW’s life.)

On the other hand, if you couldn’t get a Recount/Skada style add-on or combat log, what would you want to see added to or changed in the encounters to make them more fun for you? It never hurts to brainstorm some alternate methods and present those to the SWTOR team.

And that’s right at the heart of why SWTOR is so disappointing for many of us. They did a great job on the 1-50 leveling experience, and they are very proud of it (and rightly so). When they showed off that smooth leveling curve graph during the summit it was almost as if they were showing off a photo of their newborn baby.

But here’s the thing – a MMO can’t thrive on the leveling experience alone. Leveling is only a temporary condition. Eventually everyone (even the most casual of casuals) reaches max level on their favorite characters. Inevitably, they gradually gravitate towards raiding. If nothing else, because they eventually outgear everything else and simply run out of things to do. And if the raiding content sucks (as is the case in SWTOR already), then those players are as good as gone.

The devs just aren’t seeing eye to eye with that. It was clear in how many of the questions were answered at the summit. When one player asked for “power auras” functionality, not a single person on the dev panel had a clue what he was talking about. I don’t know how a person can claim to be in touch with the end-game community and not at least know about that at some basic level.

I will agree with both Ana and Zey’s points above though. There were some great concepts and also some bosses that just didn’t need to be there. Infernal Council was a great concept, but unfortunately easier than solo quest mobs. The “Tower of Hanoi” puzzle boss in KP was pretty interesting. At least once you figure out what the F you were supposed to be doing. Ancient Pylon puzzle is a decent idea, but could use a week or two more of dev effort on bugfixes and QA.

Thanks for your comment pallais! I am a crazy person who was raiding twice a week in swtor while WOW was still winding down, hahaha. Maybe that had something to do with it, I was raiding too much, too much…

The devs are definitely concerned with a different segment of the game. And I probably sound hypocritical saying this, but it isn’t necessarily bad that SWTOR isn’t the game I want it to be. I just want it to be my game. =/ It’s crazy because the ops/flashpoints panel was so close to what I wanted……. they said almost all the right things!

Resources…. I have more trouble swallowing that one. They are putting a combat log in the game, I actually edited the post to add a link to a preview of it (you might not have seen that when you commented, I put it in today– ninja edit!!). They are purposefully castrating it. That’s not lack of resources. =/ They know it’s a priority. They are putting the resources in. They are even pushing it to 1.2. But they are making it self-only for a reason. I think that they are just too worried about a couple dozen forum trolls screaming about wow clones and they are purposefully leaving out information =/

Yeah, the game is just not for me, I shouldn’t moan about it so much…. it is just so close!

And I wish people would stop assuming I want Recount. I actually would be fine with / maybe even prefer an out of game log. It would just have to be live so if I wanted to make the effort, I could live-parse it like WOL does.

Brainstorming other fixes, I would also be fine with a combat log that was only raid wide, say, with a guild-only run. Or only in ops. Would that not solve much of the problem?

I think there’s a bit of a disconnect between what some players want in the game they enjoy and what’s going to keep that game running in the long term. I believe that *one of* the reasons WoW’s remained popular is the thriving raid and theorycrafting community. SWToR can choose to ignore that I suppose, but is it healthy in the long term? There’s a possibility that losing the ‘elite’ players will lead to short-term enjoyment for ‘casuals’, followed by a lack of game to enjoy.

(I’m trying to emphasise that I’m making some pretty broad statements here!)